The evolution of cell phone and other communications has yielded numerous protocols and access networks for enabling communication between user equipment (UE) and the Internet or other networks. For example, access networks have been established according to LTE, 3GPP, CDMA (3GPP2), WiMAX, and WiFi standards. Increasingly, UEs such as smart phones are implementing the capability to connect to multiple types of access networks. For example, it is now common for smart phones to enable connection to WiFi access networks in addition to a cellular access network such as LTE. However, such UEs do not generally implement intelligent methods of deciding which access network to utilize and when; instead, it is often up to the user to manually enable communication via the desired access network.
The third generation partnership project (3GPP) is currently developing a number of standards defining an “access network discovery and selection function” (ANDSF) for aiding the UE in automatically selecting alternative access networks for supporting some or all of the network traffic produced by the UE. However, while these standards provide general guidance on how an ANDSF should behave in some contexts, the standards are mostly silent on the internal operations of the various devices involved.